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I admit that I began reading to find evidence that supported my view. I was sure science would back me up. And then I, complete with a list of Harvard-format references, would win the next debate. The problem was that science didn’t agree with me. I could find pockets of supporting evidence, but the overwhelming consensus was that I was wrong. It made me phenomenally uncomfortable to see a consensus emerging that directly contradicted my beliefs about how the world should be. But ultimately, science is not about how the world should be. Science is about how the world is. And if I want to make it different, I need an accurate picture of how it is now.

This is a blog on reading about genetics – what I’ve learned, and what I want to do about it. The lessons are the things that struck me as a teacher most, and are largely based on reading about intelligence or other cognitive characteristics. I want to note up front that I am not an expert, and that writing this is part of my attempt to learn more. If and when I’ve made a mistake please let me know and I will rectify it as quickly as possible.

Lesson #1: Genetics explains much more of the variation between people than I was willing to accept
The most influential type of study for this blog is the twin study, which looks to explain the variation between people and attribute it to one of three categories of cause: the shared environment (factors that would be common to a pair of twins living in the same household and attending the same school); the non-shared environment (all other environmental factors); and genetics. Studies of cognitive ability tend to find that variation is 10-20% shared environment, 30-40% non-shared environment, and 50-60% genetics.

This was hard for me to accept. I wanted to believe that most variation is caused by things within our control. Instead the shared environment, of which school is only one part, explains under a fifth of the variation between people.

Before moving on to Lesson #2 it is important to stress that we are talking about variation here – not absolute levels. We can say that 50% of variation in intelligence is genetic in origin, we can say nothing about how much of your intelligence is caused by your genes.

Lesson #2: Environments change how genes are expressed
Your genetic code is fixed, but what you do with it isn’t. Geneticist Nessa Carey likens your genetic code to the script of a play, which is then interpreted extensively by the actors and director before becoming the performance that eventually appears on stage. Epigenetics is the study of these interpretations, which are as crucial to our biological functioning as the genetic code itself.

One thing we learn from epigenetics is that our environment shapes how we interpret our genetic code, and that these interpretations stick. Once we have scrawled annotations over our genetic script they will stay unless we actively rub them out – and when our children inherit our scripts they will find many of our annotations still in place.

Extreme or consistent environmental stimuli can create epigenetic modifications that change how your genes are expressed. For example, a stressful environment can lead to genes that control the production of cortisol (a stress hormone) becoming over-expressed, meaning that you become much more easily stressed in the future. Such a change will then persist, shutting off chunks of working memory and reducing executive function in years to come.

As many epigenetic modifications are heritable it is difficult for twin studies to separate their effect from the effect of genes themselves, and so it is possible that some of the causal impact of genetics is actually environmental in origin. As our ability to do more complex analysis with the genome itself increases we will no doubt find out whether this possibility means anything in practice.

Lesson #3: Environments correlate with genes
A tall child is more likely than a short child to be asked to try out for the basketball team. Where we may have a genetic propensity towards a certain area we tend to seek out (or be pushed towards) an environment that increases that propensity. This means that a small effect that begins life as just an inkling of interest or talent can easily grow into a specialised environment that exaggerates initially small effects. It is possible that correlations like this are responsible for a significant proportion of our genes’ impact. If we adapt environments, whether consciously or not, we will be magnifying genetic differences.

Lesson #4: Genetics does not determine outcomes
Twin studies observe the differences we see today and explain their origins. They do not have any say in how big these differences are or will be in the future. So the fact that 50% of variation in a characteristic is due to genetic causes today does not mean that it must be tomorrow. Nor does it mean that we must accept present levels of difference as necessary. The numbers we find in these studies are not natural constants.

Behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin says that studies tell you what is, not what could be. He likens our genetic understanding of intelligence to our understanding of weight. Whilst it is obviously the case that people can be genetically predisposed to put on more or less weight than each other, it is also true that with the right interventions almost anybody can achieve a healthy weight. The same is true for intelligence. There may be genetic predispositions, but we can make sure that everybody achieves an acceptable level by providing the right environment.

Lesson #5: Genetics assumes determinism
If a study assumes that all difference is caused by either genetics, the shared environment or the non-shared environment, then it is also making one other underlying assumption: that everything about a person has an external cause. It assumes that your intelligence or success is a function solely of your genes and your environment. But what if everything about us is not 100% deterministic?

I was hesitant to write this lesson down, for fear of seeming to criticise the entire body of work genetics has given us. Science has to operate by studying the relationship between cause and effect. I cannot challenge it for failing to account for independent free will. But I am nonetheless uncomfortable not accounting for it. I do not know nearly enough in this area to do anything more than speculate. But I do wonder whether the large influence of the non-shared environment, that bucket for everything we can’t put our finger on, may be substantially down to things like attitude and motivation that may not be fully caused by an external mechanism.

So what do I take from all this?Firstly, that genetics plays an unquestionably big role in explaining who we are, and how our brains work. Even if some of the effect attributed to genes is in fact environmental in origin (due to epigenetics or gene-environment correlations) there is no doubt that genes have a huge influence.

But secondly, even though genes make us all different, they don’t determine our cognitive future. Long-term memory still has unlimited capacity; brain plasticity is still immense; and good teaching can still take advantage of this. Genes determine difference, but they’re no excuse for educational inequality.

Last night I attended a lecture by Yuval Noah Harari – historian and author of the popular book ‘Sapiens’. Harari’s thesis is that human society is built on shared myths, and that without these we wouldn’t be able to organise ourselves into groups of more than a couple of hundred people. These myths are things like religion, social caste, political ideologies, and money.

During questions a member of the audience asked Harari what he predicted the next great myth would be. He answered, “Data.”

Harari’s contention is that with the growth of big data we are moving towards deifying quantitative information. Just as money has become something in which we unanimously place our trust (and therefore grant great power to otherwise valueless slips of paper) so we will begin to place our faith in data.

I can see signs of this myth emerging already, and I think it goes something like this: “if we get enough data we will be able to predict the future.”

The problem is that we won’t. There are some things data cannot tell us; there are limits to its power. Bigger sample sizes can take us so far, but there are certain frontiers that no sample size can help us cross. My fear is that if the data myth grows we will increasingly find ourselves basing decisions on statistical fallacies, and in a false sense of security end up with all of our eggs in a very unstable basket.

There are four reasons this myth is wrong:

The way we use statistical significance is logically flawed – so we cannot trust our results

Many social scientists use statistical significance tests to answer the question “Given the hypothesis is true, what is the probability of observing these results?”. However the question it should be used to answer is “Given these results have been observed, what is the probability that the hypothesis is true?”. Though similar, these questions are fundamentally different.

Ziliak & McCloskey (2008) liken this to the difference between saying “Given a person has been hanged, what is the probability they are dead?” (~100%) and “Given a person is dead, what is the probability they have been hanged?” (<1%). Although these questions sound similar they give completely different answers; and we could be using our statistical significance testing to make mistakes as big as these.

The laws of societies are not fixed – so we cannot predict the impact of our actions

We use data to estimate parameters about society and the economy, such as the relationship between inflation and unemployment, or between income inequality and crime. Although we can measure the parameters of these relationships at the moment, these parameters are not fixed. In fact they are highly prone to change whenever we alter something like technology or government policy.

So for example we cannot predict the impact of a new invention on society, because our prediction would be using parameters from the pre-invention world and not accounting for the invention’s impact on the deeper structures of society. This means that the times we most want to use data to predict the future – those times of significant change – are precisely those times when to do so would be utterly invalid.

No amount of data can capture the complexity of human systems – so we cannot make predictions beyond very short time horizons

Non-linear systems suffer from what mathematicians call “sensitive dependence on initial conditions”, popularly known as the butterfly effect. In a linear system measurement error is not a big problem. As long as a measurement falls within reasonable bounds of error we can make predictions within similarly reasonable boundaries because we know how much the error can be magnified. In a non-linear system, however, measurement error, even if utterly minuscule, can completely dominate a prediction. This is because the feedback loops in such a system continually transform and magnify the error until the resulting behaviour of the model is totally divorced from that of reality.

Human systems are so complex that we cannot measure them accurately. There will always be a measurement error, no matter how much data we obtain. They are also extremely non-linear. And this means that our predictions will quickly deviate from reality.

We don’t know how to handle uncertainty – so we cannot forecast probabilities

Our forecasting models are built on probabilities. We manage risk by assigning probabilities to all possible outcomes, based on historical data. What we can’t do is manage uncertainty. Uncertainty is different to risk because it describes a situation where the possible range of outcomes and/or their probabilities are not known. If we don’t know the probability of an outcome, or we don’t even know what the outcome is, then we can’t build it into a model. And if our models only take a subset of possible outcomes, and assume that the probabilities of the past are unchanged in the future, then the probabilities they forecast will be wrong.

Education is a battleground. Public statements on schooling frequently insult dissenters, whilst civil disagreements on Twitter spontaneously combust into name-calling and bullying that puts our profession to shame. Like many battlegrounds, the soldiers on this one are often guilty of forgetting why the battle is being fought. Quick to pounce on any indicator of hostility – an innocent deployment of a loaded word, or a well-meaning opinion on a contentious topic – we have created caricatures of ourselves, and use these shorthands to distinct friend and foe.

The dominant fields of thought in education are popularly considered to be traditionalism and progressivism, and generally defined in terms of the issues they disagree over . My contention is this:

Traditionalism and progressivism are manifestations of two competing approaches to scientific reasoning, and will become more pronounced as the scientific aspects of education develop further. To be able to navigate the disputes that will ensue, and know when to leave our natural positions in favour of compromise, we need to understand what these approaches are and how they shape our thinking. Both approaches have merits and flaws – to dismiss either outright is foolish.

Mechanisms vs systems

There are two approaches to scientific thought. The mechanistic approach seeks to break processes down into smaller chunks, and understand each step of a causal chain to learn the precise mechanism that leads from cause to effect. The systems approach believes that certain properties only emerge at the system-level, and so some knowledge cannot be gathered by looking at the smaller parts – no matter in how much detail you look.

Neither of these approaches is universally ‘correct’. Through history their respective powers have oscillated depending on which was most able to generate the next breakthrough. For example, physics, though dominated for much of history by the mechanistic drive to look at the next smallest thing, had a resurgence of systems thinking after the discovery of quantum theory. Without mechanistic thinking we would not know about the existence or behaviour of fundamental particles, but without systems thinking we would not be able to link their behaviour to the phenomena we see in the observable world. Systems biology is also undergoing a resurgence at the moment, and is proving an incredibly popular option on many university courses.

There are times when the dominant theory endorsed by one approach is simply wrong, and is eventually abandoned in favour of another. However this does not mean that the approach itself is wrong. Science progresses by resolving individual disputes and selecting the best theories, whilst preserving the approaches to thought themselves.

The dichotomy in education

The battleground in education is too often defined by the micro-level disagreements, which mask the underlying approaches to thought that are the origins of these disagreements. I prefer to follow these definitions:

Traditionalism: a preference for mechanistic thinking, or solving problems by looking at component parts to explore observable chains of cause and effect

Progressivism: a preference for systems thinking, or solving problems by looking at properties of entire systems rather than smaller causal chains

Mechanistic thinking: striving to understand the components of learning

Mechanistic thinking digs deeper into the processes of learning. Its natural instinct is towards some kind of experiment with falsifiable hypotheses, and ideally work with quantifiable data. It believes that by learning more about the intricate parts of learning, we will be able to adapt our policies and practice to benefit children. Without mechanistic thinking we would lack these insights and be unable to intervene effectively in the processes of learning – just like early medicine was fixated on the system at the expense of understanding the causal chains.

However mechanistic thinking has its flaws. A whole is often more than the sum of its parts, with certain properties only emerging at the system level that are not observable in the mechanisms themselves. Mechanistic thinking risks missing these, and so maximising the effectiveness of individual processes without actually maximising the end result for the child.

Systems thinking: striving to understand the child as a whole

Systems thinking looks at the overarching behaviour of the child as a whole. Its natural instinct is towards more qualitative research over a longer period of time, and will happily look for effects that cannot be quantified. This does not mean that they cannot be understood scientifically, but that they need more complex techniques as they deal with more complex systems than the individual processes of mechanistic thinking. Without systems thinking we would lack insight into the emergent properties of systems (that only appear at the system-level) – which would leave our knowledge of mechanisms divorced from our observations of reality.

However systems thinking has its flaws. We can only learn so much about a system without understanding its components, and knowledge of details does allow us to develop a greater knowledge at the system-level. By casting aside mechanistic inquiry as reductionist it risks missing out on these details, and so halting the growth of our understanding.

The thinking cycle

Every scientific field is subject to a natural “thinking cycle”, where the influence of these two approaches oscillates and they alternate in dominance. Each takes its turn as the revolutionary, that steps in and makes a much-needed change to overthrow the complacent orthodoxy of the day. We need eras of mechanistic dominance to dig deeper and learn more about the processes of learning. However between these we need eras of systems dominance to link our discoveries and make coherent theories of children’s’ whole development.

Learn to understand each other, but not necessarily to compromise

The message of this post is not to blandly compromise. There are correct theories and there are incorrect theories – the answer is rarely in the middle. However we do need to learn the discipline of adopting both approaches in our thinking. If mechanistic thinkers could step back and try to think of systems, and if systems thinkers could look deeper and try to think of mechanisms, we would take a great step forward in understanding each other and growing our knowledge about education.